Cost engineering · 21 August 2026

What it costs to build this watch in Switzerland

A complete bill of materials for the whole device — every component, the Swiss case set, Swiss PCBA and assembly, per-unit radar calibration, packaging and yield loss. Ex-works, ex-VAT, before NRE. Move the controls; every number recomputes from the lines below.

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Ex-works cost per unit
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Direct cost, before yield loss
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Fully loaded, NRE over this batch
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Swiss premium vs Shenzhen
The finding

This is not an electronics cost problem

The silicon — including the radar, the display and a pre-certified ESP32-S3 module — is about one seventh of the build cost. Roughly six times more money goes into a machined Swiss case and Swiss hands. Any serious cost-down work happens on the right-hand bars, not the left.

Direct cost split at the selected volume, CHF per unit.
The ten largest single lines. The case alone is more than the entire electronics BOM.
Bill of materials

Every line

verified means a distributor or primary source was read on 21 August 2026 and the price is quoted as found. estimate means our own figure from a stated basis — those are the lines an RFQ replaces. Hover any row for its reasoning.

Deleted from the reference design. Dropping LoRa, GNSS, NFC, the audio path, the microSD socket and the GPIO expander removes — per unit of components, frees the pins the radar needs, cuts four radio bands out of the certification file, and buys back the power the radar spends. That deletion is worth more than the radar costs.
Sensitivity

The unquoted display barely matters

The AMOLED is the one line with no public price anywhere — the supplier states "negotiation". It is also almost irrelevant: a 40% miss moves the unit cost by two percent. Yield and the case finish move it six to ten times harder. Worry about the right things.

Change in ex-works unit cost at the selected volume against the base case.
Cost-down

One change does almost all the work

Ex-works CHF per unit by case strategy and volume.At 10,000 the polymer case is injection moulded, not machined — the CHF 25–45k mould sits in NRE, not here.
The problem

A machined, polished 316L case for a 63.5 × 49 × 22 mm device is CHF 118 at a thousand units — three times the entire electronics bill. Hand polishing is the expensive part, and it is skilled Swiss labour measured in tens of minutes per case.

The answer

Machine the case from a high-performance polymer instead. It saves CHF 105 a unit, needs no separate radar window because the whole case is transparent at 60 GHz, weighs less on a device already criticised at 22 mm thick — and SMO Art. 4 counts machining, so the Swiss case claim survives.

The tempting mistake

At a thousand units, buying the case set in Asia saves only CHF 18 more than the Swiss polymer route — and costs you the single Swiss designation this product can lawfully make. By ten thousand it saves nothing at all, because a moulded Swiss polymer case is cheaper than a machined Asian metal one.

Swiss content

You pass the famous test and still cannot say it

Swiss share of manufacturing cost, computed from the lines above. Packaging, transport and the battery are excluded from the calculation by SMO Art. 2c.
Art. 1a lit. d — the 60% cost test: passes comfortably. Because the case, the assembly, the testing and the calibration are all Swiss labour, Swiss content lands in the mid-eighties before any development cost is counted — and Swiss technical development is expressly includable on top.
Art. 2(1)(c) — the 50% component-value test: fails at zero. Not one electronic component in this BOM is Swiss-manufactured, and Art. 2a says a foreign part never counts however it is repackaged. There is no Swiss ESP32, no Swiss AMOLED and no Swiss 60 GHz radar to buy.
So the claim is a Swiss case, under Art. 4 — one essential operation (machining or polishing) plus assembly and inspection in Switzerland. That is true, checkable, and it is the reason the polymer case matters: it keeps the claim while removing the cost.
What would make this real

Five quotes replace half these numbers

Everything marked estimate is our arithmetic, not a price anyone has offered. These five requests cost nothing but time and would convert the majority of the cost base into fact.

The number that is not in this model. None of the above answers whether the Acconeer radar service will run on an ESP32-S3 at all — it ships as licensed object code per target and the vendor recommends Cortex-M4/M33 hosts. If the answer is no, add a co-processor at roughly CHF 4–6 a unit plus a second toolchain. That is one email, and it should be sent before anything here is committed to a layout.